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Ever been working on somebody else’s code with their cruddy old custom string class and come across this?

Gee, thanks summary!

…only to drill down into the object to find more of this:

WHARGARBL?

Do you see my actual string there at the very bottom? Man… I’d really hate to have to do this every damned time I want to get at a string! Luckily, that empty summary box is not the final word in debugger previews. Instead you can use a handy little scripting language to create DATA FORMATTERS that will do the work for you. Check this out!

What's that?

….and then…

HOOOOOOOOO!

BAM! You win. By the way, in case you were wondering: The ‘:s’ gives you the summary field of the value you’ve drilled down to.

I’m sorry I abandoned you, Internet! I know I haven’t called or written lately, and I’m really sorry for that. I’ve been spending quite a bit of my off-hours time developing noncritical engine features for NYMPH, and haven’t really had much time to write on the ol’ blog.

I’ve got a couple ideas for posts kicking around that you may find interesting. Firstly I want to write about why the hell it’s so hard to turn a profit over here in Gameland while Techland over in the Valley seemingly has more money than it knows what to do with. I mean– I know we’re kind of commoditized as a field, but don’t we get a pass by sheer virtue of the fact that we’re in a creative industry? Evidently not.

So it’s no secret that you can use GTalk to update your Twitter status, but I got really tired of having both an IM status message via pidgin, as well as a Twitter status message that propagated to– well, everything else really.

It takes some set-up if you don’t have perl on your system (and then even if you do, you have to tell it to install some new stuff, although it does all the work for you). After you’ve got step 3 enabled, it’s pretty much just a matter of downloading the plugin and turning it on.

However, I definitely decided that this wasn’t enough, because it doesn’t weed out messages beginning with “@” the way the Facebook app does. Thus it was time to dig into the code:

Well, I guess living in a state with a severe drought can skew your perspective. It’s really just more like your average spring storm.

By that I mean– I’ll be doing 20 hr/wk of scripting and coding for Spark Plug Games, starting tomorrow. This is on top of the web software that I’ve contracted to develop for a friend. In addition to that, there will also probably be work with Spark Plug’s parent company in the flash/php space.
Looks like I could very easily be back to 40 hrs/wk pretty quickly with all this going down. Torrential downpours of MONEY!

Since I’ve still got people asking me what’s going on employment-wise, and I don’t really have much extra to say– I’ll say what I can here.

Things more or less fell through with the casual studio I was in talks with, as they won’t be able to start development until July, and I am definitely in need of employment now. No hard feelings, definitely. The head of the studio is still working hard to get me in as a Flash developer with the parent company. No big change there, just waiting for the hiring guy to get back.

Otherwise, what’s up? I’ve turned in my Tech Test at Emergent, and am just waiting to hear back. Evidently all their HR folks are super-tied-up right now with training new hires (and I hear the head of Gamebryo HR is out for two damn weeks).

Basically, if I don’t hear back about the Flash position this week, I’d bet on my being out of a job for a few weeks at least.

In other news, it’s my fucking birthday! Amie’s taking me out to PF Chang’s tonight (I didn’t really have a preference so I allowed myself to be swayed). She also went out hunting for a present yesterday, and returned with a traditional bag-packaged object of not insubstantial weight. I tried to convince her to let the openings proceed early, but she’d have none of it. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m going to get measured for a tux for Mike’s wedding tonight as well. Any longer and I may miss out on groomsmanship imo.